How to install Joomla with wamp

Content Management Systems (CMS) are the way forward with most web design, I believe. They offer an unbelievably easy way to create pretty decent looking websites without the added fuss of having to know indepth coding. The majority of this is automatically done for you. So, in this tutorial you are going to learn how to download, install and manipulate with one of these called Joomla. Another one of these is called Drupal, which seemingly is better for the more technical aspects but Joomla is just as good.

In this tutorial you are going to need to download first a program called Wamp, which can be downloaded from this site.

Once you have done that, you can now download Joomla from here. It's completely free and open source. In a few minutes we are going to start getting to the somewhat difficult things, so I shall be using photos to illustrate this.

When your Joomla files have been fully downloaded, you need to extract them to your Wamp folder. By default, it will have installed to C:\wamp. If you have installed it correctly, then you should see the following files:

The folder you are going to extract the Joomla files to is the www folder, as shown in the above image. For the purpose of this tutorial, I have created folder called FA Tutorial inside the www folder, and this is where I am going to extract the Joomla files to.

When this is finished, you need to make sure that the wamp server is running. To do this, you need to search for wamp and click on "Start Wamp Server". Wamp should take a few seconds to be fully ready - the icon will first appear red, then yellow before turning white, as seen in the below image -In the newer versions, they have changed the icon to this -

When it has turned fully green, you need to click on it, to bring up this:

Then you are going to click on Localhost, which should automatically open up your browser and take you to this screen-

At this point, you will know if you extracted the Joomla files to the correct folder, if you have something similar to FA Tutorial, under "Your Projects", as I do here-Now, before you do anything with Joomla, you first need to set up the database. To do this, you need to click on phpmyadmin. From this screen you need to click on Databases on the top left corner and then type in the name of the database you want to create, in my case it's going to be FATutorial -and then click "Create". Voila! You've just created a database.

When this is done, you need to navigate back to the localhost, following the steps above. When you have, you can finally click on FATutorial (or whatever you may have called it) under Your Projects and finally you get taken to the Joomla installer.

The first few screens are relatively easy and unless you want to really pay attention, you can click next until you get to the database screen, as seen here:This is why you needed to have a database already set up. For this, the username is mostly always going to be root and the database name will be whatever you called it in phpmyadmin, in my case fatutorial. You'll know you have done it correctly when you get taken to the FTTP step. If you already have a domain name and hosting purchased, with FTTP set up, you can put the details here so you can FTTP it to the host. However, since we are running it using wamp on the localhost (i.e. on this computer rather than over the internet), we can just skip this by clicking next.

Here is where you put in the site details. In my case the site name is going to be FATutorial, the email [email protected] and the password fatutorial. The Admin username should be left at admin, just because it's going to be easier when you get to accessing the admin area. It is a good idea to also install the sample data, as it will give you an idea as to how the site will look when it's fully up and running.

This is now the final screen and you just need to delete the install directory before proceeding.This can be done pretty easily by clicking "Remove Installation Folder"

When you click on "site" on the top right, you will be taken to this -Voila! That is all your hard work. The reason it's coming up like this is because of the sample data you installed a few steps previously. Now, if you want to edit this, you can do so by navigating to the administrator screen.

This is done by adding /administrator after the URL of the site, as shown above. If it worked, you should be taken to a screen like this one -

where you would add in the details that you had previously set for the admin - in my case, the username was admin and the password was fatutorial. If all the details were put in correctly, you should be taken to the admin panel, as seen below, where you can manipulate the data on your newly created site:

and there you have it - you have downloaded wamp, joomla and you have created databases as well as installing joomla and getting it to run on the localhost. If you have any queries, make sure to comment below.